Netbooks were largely a passing fad as were Chromebooks in large part, though the latter are still around to some degree. However, OLPC went beyond cheap laptops and, however well-intentioned, never really took off as a unique entity.
"In 2020, Chromebooks outsold Apple Macs for the first time by taking market share from laptops running Microsoft Windows. This rise is attributed to the platform's success in the education market.[79][80][81]"
Hmm.
This is interesting. Searches give you different numbers.
But it looks like the number of Chromebooks sold each year is comparable, but probably lower than the number of Macs.
At the same time, as far as I can tell, Chromebooks are pretty much all K-12 focused devices at this point. Which is fine. But I'd potentially buy something higher-end if it were available. But it isn't.
Of course, having found and incubated a useful niche, Google has canceled Chrome OS, so Chromebook offerings are going to be trickier to find.
One could argue that OLPC made people outside of Japan aware that the form factor was possible and even optimal for some users.
I had a couple in the late 00s to avoid having to lug around my 15" MacBook Pro when on-call. For that they worked great, but other than that I avoided it.
Later I got the 11" MacBook Air, and that had many of the same issues (especially weird screen size). It also wasn't that small, by today's standards, as it had a massive bezzle.
Nowadays I have to check if my 13" MacBook Pro is in my bag, as it's small and light enough not to notice. However I'd love a MacBook Air that is same aspect ratio as the 13" just smaller width and depth (No Apple, it doesn't need to be thinner), maybe with a 60% keyboard so typing isn't weird.